Advancements in x-ray lasers have potential for research in many fields. We talk to a UW-Madison physics professor about his work. Then, the Weather Guys are back to explain what we’ve been experiencing climatewise.
ales of previously owned homes in Wisconsin rose 8.1 percent in June compared to the same month last year.
That’s according to the Wisconsin Realtors Association’s latest housing report. Kurt Paulsen, professor of urban planning in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called the sales jump a “mixed signal.”
If you are not feeling well and need an urgent care appointment, UW Health has an app letting you know the wait times at each clinic.
Written by James Dahlberg, a professor emeritus in the department of biomolecular chemistry at UW-Madison.
After three successful shows in the last month at Camp Randall — the first in 28 years — Madison is back on the map for the biggest musical acts. The city, its boosters and the university should do everything it can to keep it that way.
“I am concerned that this legislation, and the broad adoption of stablecoins that it will facilitate, may trigger a crisis at the very heart of the banking system,” writes Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Copelovitch is also the author of “The International Monetary Fund in the Global Economy: Banks, Bonds, and Bailouts” and co-author of “Banks on the Bank: Global Capital, Securities Markets, and the Political Roots of Financial Crises.”
“We have these negative associations with waste, particularly smellier waste, that is associated with poverty and disease – other things we don’t like to see or think about,” said Sarah A Moore, a professor in the department of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Henderson brushed off the experience, hoping it was a fluke. But after matching into residency at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, she overheard a medical student lamenting about their housing struggles and something clicked.
“The lightbulb went off in my head,” Henderson said. “I realized I think this is a nationwide issue and then really started to look into it from there.”
Written by Mark Copelovitch, a professor of political science and public affair, and director of the Center for European Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Emily Callaci’s history of the international feminist movement examines the influence of their intellectual and political victories. The University of Wisconsin–Madison historian describes in “Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor,” that modes of protest were part of an emerging, dynamic wave of left-feminist activism.
Callaci’s book marks a significant contribution to the new Wages for Housework literature and serves as a reminder of the campaign’s true aims. Weaving together capsule biographies of five of its founders, it offers a history that reflects Wages for Housework’s global scope and radical ambitions.
Greg Nemet, a professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, knows this isn’t the first time people have declared the “dawn of the solar age.” People in the 1950s, the 1970s and the early 2000s all declared an imminent solar age, only to see fossil fuels continue to dominate.
Pete Long, an adjunct professor teaching strategic communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, agreed that every aspect of the design, both the graphics and the product, is intentional.
For Kleenex facial tissues, he said limited editions and seasonal graphics are created to help consumers navigate the shelf and ultimately convince them to purchase.
And when it comes to warning people about flash floods in particular, experts still stress the need to get warnings to people via every means possible.
That’s why a “Swiss cheese” approach to warning people can be most effective in overcoming that last mile, Chris Vagasky, a meteorologist and manager of the Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explains. (And it’s similar to an ideology used to prevent the spread of disease.)
“You know you got slices of Swiss cheese and they’ve got holes in them. Nothing is ever perfect. But if you layer enough pieces of cheese, it reduces the risk because something might go through one hole, but then it gets blocked,” Vagasky says. “We always want people to have multiple ways of receiving warnings.”
“There are a small number of studies suggesting uptake of PFAS through skin is possible and the concentrations of PFHxA reported in the study are quite high,” said Christina Remucal, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
William Banholzer, an engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been traveling to town meetings arguing research doesn’t support banning the boats. Banholzer, who owns a wakesurfing boat but says that doesn’t affect his conclusions, said studies show about 70% of a wave’s energy is dissipated at around 200 feet.
“If you’re taking my rights away, you better have a preponderance of evidence on your side, and they don’t,” Banholzer said.
“Regulators introduced expanded audit reporting to increase the usefulness of the audit report to investors by requiring the auditor to discuss the most challenging issues. However, Prior research generally finds that key audit matters do not influence investor perceptions of audited companies,” says Dan Lynch, a professor of accounting at the Wisconsin School of Business.
While it’s not unusual to see candidates announce early, this level of spending this early is unprecedented, said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
One study by the University of Wisconsin-Madison found there are “no official statistics on the number of unauthorized immigrant dairy workers.”
“Estimates range from 46 percent; to as high as 90 percent, with the most used estimate being 70 percent,” the report said on Page 11.
“It’s worth remembering what those [2017] changes were,” said Ross Milton, an assistant professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison. “Those were some tax cuts for middle-income households and pretty large tax cuts for high-income households, and those are being extended permanently as part of this new act.”
As President Donald Trump orders and sometimes rescinds tariffs on countries across the globe this year, one of his top advisers is an economics professor on leave from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Trump appointed Kim Ruhl in February to his Council of Economic Advisers, a three-member panel that plays a central role in shaping domestic and international economic policy and counselling the president.
Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region have all the pieces to build a fusion industry here. UW-Madison is one of the top two fusion energy research universities in the country (MIT is the other). Amazingly, UW-Madison has spun out three of the world’s 45 fusion companies: SHINE Technologies; Type One Energy and Realta Fusion. And UW-Madison alumni work at all the major U.S. fusion companies that use magnetic (as opposed to laser) plasma containment.
Exact Sciences, which is headquartered in the UW Research Park and has labs along the Beltline on Madison’s West Side, has announced that its Oncodetect molecular residual disease test has received approval through the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Molecular Diagnostic Services Program.
Data on the long-term health effects is limited, because vapes are relatively new and constantly evolving. Many people who use them are in their teens or 20s; it might take a while before further effects become apparent.
Even so, “common sense tells you — your mom would tell you — that a superheated chemical inhaling right into your lungs isn’t going to be good,” said Dr. James H. Stein, a professor of cardiovascular medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine. Increasingly, research is pointing to the reality that while vapes do not contain the same dangerous chemicals as cigarettes, they come with their own harms.
In addition to an established relationship with the local power company, he said the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the area’s “skilled workforce” made the county an attractive location.
The Black Males in Engineering (BME) video series, led by UW-Madison School of Education faculty member Dr. Brian Burt, recently received a Silver Telly Award in the Campaign – Education & Training category. The honor recognizes non-broadcast video campaigns created for general educational purposes and underscores the series’ impact on addressing critical gaps in STEM education support.
Tim Baye, a professor of business development and a state energy and energy finance specialist with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Extension, said developers have been rushing since November to get planned projects moving in time to qualify for tax credits.
While there may be an initial rush to meet requirements for tax credits in the short term, Baye said he expects the bill will cause a slowdown in renewable development once those incentives sunset.
“We’re going to see a real slowdown,” he said. “It’s going to have a chilling effect.”
While the Wisconsin dairy industry is known to rely on unauthorized workers (it’s believed about 70% of the workforce is working illegally), the majority in the state actually work elsewhere, said Laura Dresser, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
From Dresser’s perspective, undocumented workers are especially vulnerable when law enforcement agencies focus more on immigration status and less on violations of workers’ rights.
That culture of fear can create “incentives for some employers to find a way to drive wages and standards down,” Dresser said.
Michael Morgan, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said precipitation forecasting remains “one of the most vexing problems” of his field.
But he said he believed the National Weather Service did its job by giving a general sense of the Texas storm and then providing more specific local forecasts as additional information became available to highlight the most serious potential threats.
“I think the [National] Weather Service forecasts were on point,” Morgan said. “Specifically targeting in locations that are going to receive the maximum rainfall is an incredibly challenging forecast problem.”
“Meteorologists have been launching weather balloons for almost 100 years now. We continue to do it because that is the only way that we get direct measurements of everything that’s going on above us in the atmosphere,” said Chris Vagasky, who manages the Wisconsin Environmental Mesonet, or Wisconet, a network of weather and soil monitoring stations across the state.
Written by meteorologist and research program manager at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Lawmakers’ attention was drawn to fusion by three startup companies that have made Wisconsin their home, as well as research by the University of Wisconsin. One of the companies, Realta Fusion, worked with lawmakers as they drafted the legislation.
Slower wage growth has an outsized impact on the cost of services, said Menzie Chinn, an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Because services are provided, you know, the main input is going to be labor,” he said.
But Chinn said there are factors that could actually lead to higher wages in the service sector. For instance, employees might ask for higher wages to help them cover the cost of tariffs.
The aesthetic damage is more than just cosmetic. “It’s the most common sawfly found infesting landscapes and Christmas tree plantations,” according to the University of Wisconsin, which notes these sawflies thrive in pines like Scots, red, Jack, and Mugo—common species in holiday tree lots.
The wave of defaults may also inflict costs on taxpayers. Sending debts to collection comes with administrative costs, says Nicholas Hillman, a professor of education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “There are inefficiencies in the loan repayment system and the collections system,” says Hillman. “So it’s expensive.” Hillman stressed, however, that the alternative to collections—allowing borrowers to forgo debt payments, effectively canceling the loans—would be far more costly for taxpayers.
During a recent training session for crops and soils specialists, plant pathologist Damon Smith with the University of Wisconsin says growers are experiencing weather that is ideal for corn tar spot infection.
“It’s too early to see symptoms now,” he told them, “but it is likely that infections are occurring and that growers need to be vigilant in their scouting of susceptible fields in coming weeks.”
Written by ssociate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and tudent in computer science, both a the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The new Vera C. Rubin telescope in Chile that just started recording images of the night sky has 3.2 billion pixels – that’s billion with a “b” – making it the largest digital camera ever constructed. Interview with Keith Bechtol, an associate professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the systems verification and validation scientist for the Vera C. Rubin telescope project.
Materials engineering programs typically have dozens of students, not hundreds. To put this into perspective, however, the Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts an average of just 10 job openings per year for neurologists in Wisconsin. Hopefully, no one would suggest that UW-Madison should stop training neurology residents, since most of us recognize that medical specialists are essential to the kind of society we want to have.
Partnering with Forward BIOLABS — one of the many tenants that call the research park home — URP helped create a new shared coworking lab incubator in Madison. Forward BIOLABS offers turn-key life science labs, fully equipped, maintained and supported with networking, training and other growth services aimed at startups.
“With millions of dollars of shared lab equipment, Forward BIOLABS is an ideal place to get started,” said Aaron Olver, managing director of the University Research Park. “And MERLIN Mentors creates customized volunteer mentor teams to help companies achieve liftoff.”
Housing financial stress has been rising among Wisconsin residents, and it is tied to an increase in negative health outcomes, according to a report from the University of Wisconsin-Extension.
The report found that housing instability is linked to worsened mental and physical health and may cause food insecurity, physical exhaustion, hypertension and lowered fertility. While this stress is more common among renters than homeowners, the consequential health impacts were linked more with older homeowners, co-author of the report and associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics Tessa Conroy said.
“Almost 40 years ago, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison named Gary Milhollin, who had worked as a judge on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, had an idea that more needed to be done to prevent countries from building weapons of mass destruction,” said Valerie Lincy, executive director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. “He created the organization with the mission of stopping the spread of these weapons by stopping trade in items that can be used to make them. We’ve been working with that mission ever since.”
UW Health is not legally required to recognize its nurses’ union or engage in collective bargaining, a unanimous state Supreme Court ruled.
The court’s ruling upholds previous decisions by the Wisconsin Employment Relations Commission and a Dane County Circuit Court judge.
UW-Madison political science professor Mark Copelovitch explains how today’s rise in authoritarianism and protectionist policies mirrors the 1930s backlash against globalization. He warns that pushback against democracy and global trade often go hand in hand.
“With county fairs, there’s always a lot of movement of cattle whether it’s within the county or if there are open shows,” Jerry Clark, a crops and soils educator with UW-Madison’s Division of Extension, said. “These cattle are moving across county lines and so it’s just another way that fairs are doing their part.”
“A lot of Wisconsin businesses have been struggling with finding employees, and they have been for a number of years, going back to before COVID,” said Steven Deller, a professor of agricultural and applied economics at UW-Madison and one of the report’s authors.
“The whole idea for the (Rubin) observatory was so visionary when it was conceived (in the 1990s) that many of the technologies didn’t exist at that time” said Keith Bechtol, a physics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Lawmakers’ attention was drawn to fusion by three startup companies that have made Wisconsin their home, as well as research by the University of Wisconsin. One of the companies, Realta Fusion, worked with lawmakers as they drafted the legislation.
The excitement inside of a University of Wisconsin-Madison lecture hall Monday morning was comparable to a room full of sports lovers ready for the start of the Super Bowl.
UW-Madison political science professor Mark Copelovitch discusses how the unstable landscape of tariffs and war abroad disrupt both the overall global marketplace and the everyday lives of American consumers.
“The models that we’re seeing right now are able to create content that is incredibly persuasive, and incredibly hard to detect as AI generated. It’s impossible to predict just how corrosive this will be to political discourse in this country,” said Annette Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “It’s just not feasible for ordinary citizens to do a ton of extra research on which content is actually legitimate.
“I think we’ll learn a lot about what the capabilities of various A.I. protocols are from how well we can get them to generate material that’s of interest,” said Jordan S. Ellenberg, a mathematician at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is part of a team applying for an Exponentiating Mathematics grant. “We have no intuition yet about which problems are going to be hard and which problems are easy. We need to learn that.”
Keith Poulsen, director of the Wisconsin Veterinary Diagnostic Laboratory, said the impact was disappointing last year, especially given the amount of work exhibitors put into getting an animal ready for show.
“I’m hoping that with one year of experience under their belt, they feel more comfortable to be able to submit that testing and make sure that we have robust cow classes in these shows,” said Poulsen, whose lab processes all of the avian flu samples taken in the state. “It’s part of our culture, and we missed that last year.”
Already, a group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Realta Fusion, a Madison-based nuclear startup, have developed a fusion device in Stoughton that creates the same kind of reaction that fuels the sun and stars. The process is much different than fission, the nuclear reaction that powers current nuclear reactors and the atomic bomb.
Alan Rubel, who studies the ethics of data and surveillance and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, highlighted the fact that MPD wants a trade, rather than purchasing the tech.
“That’s going to be very useful for that company,” he said.
“We’ve collected this data as part of a public investment, in mugshots and the criminal justice system, but now all that effort is going to go to training an AI system,” he added.
Earlier this year, I worked with Gigafact using Parser to process 24 hours from the same hosts the week after this year’s Super Bowl. We came up with a list of claims in two hours.
Wisconsin Watch and Gigafact presented that case study in using AI at a recent Journalism Educators Institute conference hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. We’ll present it again this week at the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in New Orleans.
Both large and small dairy farms in Wisconsin depend on immigrant laborers to fill positions that go unfilled by local workers. Undocumented workers perform an estimated 70% of the work on Wisconsin’s dairy farms, according to a University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Workers study.
The Emerging Crops Accelerator program through Extension at the University of Wisconsin-Madison included fiber flax production in its November 2024 strategic plan. The team has supported Schroeder’s studies through supporting her grant applications and finding her farming equipment.
Allan “Bud” Selig, Sheldon Lubar and Stephen Marcus each received the Herb Kohl Service Award from the Milwaukee Jewish Federation on June 11. Roughly 550 people from the Jewish community, and the greater Milwaukee community, attended the Pfister Hotel event.
Each award winner knew Kohl personally from their childhood, or from attending the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Poker puts into focus the same gender dynamics that can create anxiety for women in a patriarchal society, says Jessica Calarco, a sociologist, professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and author of ”Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.” “You’re expected to read the room, stay composed, and manage risk — much like women do every day in a world that asks them to carry everything without appearing to struggle,” she tells me.
University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Annette Zimmermann is a political philosopher of AI and co-lead of the school’s Uncertainty and AI research group.
“Much like many other experts working in this area, I’ve been deeply concerned about imposing such a heavy handed blanket ban on any sort of state-based efforts to effectively regulate this space,” Zimmermann said. “Right now, unfortunately, we’re in a regulatory landscape where we are heavily relying on individual states to think very hard about how to protect ordinary citizens and consumers from these kinds of harmful outputs.”
